To the power of four.

Sequels! They're great, aren't they?

(By the way, this will be my geekiest/nerdiest post yet. I might have to find a couple of Julia Roberts' movies to rant about next, just to balance out the scales a bit)

But back to sequels, and how great they are. You get to see the characters you know and love face new and exiting villains in new and exciting situations.

What's that you say? Movie sequels are generally crap? A desperate attempt by the studios to wring every last nickel out of its fans without having to generate any original ideas or display any sort of creativity?

Oh, you. You're such a cynic.

Of hobbits and wizards and things that go bump in the plot.

I was trying desperately to come up with something to say about Back to the Future, part 3. I can’t possibly make fun of it or poke holes in it, I love it too much.

So I turned to another trilogy. A small series of indie movie you may not have heard of called "Lord of the Rings".

I watched these a while back. As the hobbits went from where they lived to where they were going, to do the thing they needed to do (admittedly, I may not have been giving it my full attention) I started thinking about what all the Hobbitses have done since.

Consider Back to the Future (part II)

Right, last time I talked about the diverging time-lines of "Back to the Future", and how the movie finished with a sort of loose end, if you analysed it to a stupidly obsessive degree.

With the sequel, there are no such loose ends. It's a perfect harmony of looping causality, dovetailing together with no problems whatsoever.

What I will talk about is the fact that the "future" they visited is 2015. That's only five years from now.

Consider "Back to the Future"

One of my favourite scenes in that film is when Marty arrives back to 1985 at the end of the movie. He races back to the mall just in time to see his earlier self jump in the DeLorean and vanish.

Or so I thought.

I realised some time ago that it's not 1985; it's 1985(i). A parallel world where the "Twin Pines Mall" is the "Lone Pine Mall". Where George(i) McFly is a successful writer, and smugly lords his success over auto-detailer Biff(i) (who, by the way, seems to be suffering some sort of severe emotional damage)